2. Speak conversationally
I used to read directly from a script. While this was enough for me as a beginner, when it came time to step-up the quality of my content, I decided to follow bullet-point notes only. Mayer’s personalization principle from his theory of multimedia learning highlights that talking in a conversational tone improves student attention.
Following the personalization principle, I use bullet points to keep me on track with the content, but instead of reading from the screen, I talk in a conversational tone as if I were in a one-to-one tutorial session. Speaking from bullet points rather than pre-planned scripts helps me directly address my students, personalize my content, and makes them feel as if they’ve been engaged in a direct conversation with me.
Extending this point, I often turn my bullet points into lists to help student retention. Just like list-form blog posts, list-form videos seem popular among students. I therefore tend to label my video in the format: “Five Key Takeaways from This Week’s Task.”
Related: 3 ways video assessment fosters community in online courses
3. Make it fast and focused
YouTube has analytics tools that examine how long it takes a student to close the video. Examining the analytics tools taught me that students stop watching en masse if I talk too long or go even slightly off topic. While many students enjoy watching videos, they don’t want their time to be wasted. Online students are very busy people, often studying online so they can continue working full time or raising children. I respect their time and try to not waste it by going on longer than necessary.
Educational podcasting literature often recommends keeping a podcast to less than 10 minutes. I follow that rule for my videos, too. I will spend 30 seconds to a minute on each bullet point that I created as my key talking points. This method helps the videos progress quickly and smoothly and retains student attention.
4. End with a question
For me, the primary purpose of integrating videos into my online courses was to increase student engagement. As many e-learning experts argue, quality online courses create sociable, interactive learning environments.
I don’t want my students to just watch me talking; I want them to engage in conversation with me. Therefore, I always end my videos with a question. The questions don’t need to be difficult, and indeed, there’s a good chance you’ve already embedded questions into your online forum tasks. I usually borrow my forum task question and end with a simple, “What do you think? Share your thoughts on these ideas in the forum task below.”
Videos are a great way to draw students into your weekly activities, sustain their attention, and engage them in conversation. Starting out with webcam and screencasts with free software like Screencast-O-Matic is a great first step. As you build confidence in video creation, I encourage you to take your videos to the next level with my four recommendations above. What do you think of these recommendations? Are there any you would add? Feel free to tweet your thoughts to @cpdgrew.
Dr. Chris Drew is an eLearning advisor with Swinburne Online University. He has taught and developed online courses in Australia and the U.K. He blogs at EssayGuidance.com, where you can watch some of the videos he has created for his students.
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